1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to contact management, and more specifically relates to a method, system, and computer program product for enhancing collaboration using a corporate social network to infer contacts.
2. Related Art
In any large organization, such as a university, company, or government, employees or other members of the organization have to collaborate with a wide variety of people in order to perform different kinds of tasks. They collaborate with people, not only in their own group or department, but also in other departments, especially service departments such as Human Resources, Legal, Finance, Information Technology, Purchasing, Facilities, Public Relations, etc. These service departments often assign specific people to handle predefined tasks for predetermined groups of employees. However, this contact information is often not available explicitly to the employees making use of the services. As such, it becomes difficult for a person, especially a new employee, to find the right contact for performing a particular task or for answering a particular question. Typically, an employee will ask his/her peers, managers, or assistants for the right contact. This approach, however, may not always be efficient or lead to the correct person.
Existing corporate directories normally provide certain details about each employee, such as contact information and position. Some corporate directories also indicate the management chain in the organization (e.g., via an org chart). Other directories also have expertise and skill information and allow searching for employees with certain skills or expertise. However, there is a distinction between an expert in a certain kind of task and the right contact for the task. The right contact for a task may not be the foremost expert in that area. Instead, it is often someone who is assigned to help a certain group of employees to perform a certain kind of task. To illustrate the distinction, consider the situation where a light bulb has blown out in an employee's office. The employee does not need the company maintenance expert, but the maintenance person who covers their office.
Another problem with expertise and skill directories is that these directories often rely on individual employees to fill in the details, which they don't always do. Hence, such information is often incomplete and out-of-date.
There are two broad approaches to providing employees with contact information. The first is a centralized approach, wherein a certain entity in an organization maintains and provides the contact information for all employees in the organization. One problem with this approach is that it requires personnel to be dedicated to the task of creating and updating the contact information. Using this approach is difficult if the set of contact types or job responsibilities is a large and constantly changing set. The other approach for providing contact information is a decentralized approach, such as that provided by a social network. This type of system allows people to create links to their friends or acquaintances. Users can then explore and interact with people in the resulting social network. One advantage of social networks is that the information is created and maintained in a collaborative and distributed manner. These systems do not depend on a central authority to collect and maintain information about the relationships between people. Since there are a large number of people maintaining information about their contacts, the system tends to have fairly accurate and up-to-date information. Unfortunately, such informal social networks typically only allow relationships based on friendship (and its variants) and are thus not sufficient for use in a corporate environment where many different types of relationships may exist among employees.